January 25, 2009
Michael Brooks's 13 Things That Don't Make Sense turned up on a lot of "Best science books of 2008" lists, and the concept of a book about scientific anomalies seemed interesting, so I ordered it from Amazon. It's a quick read (a mere 210 pages, and breezily written), but ultimately a frustrating…
January 25, 2009
In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "restore science to its rightful place." Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science.
Many of these responses will focus on…
January 24, 2009
nanoscale views: What is a polaron?
"One common example of a quasiparticle is the polaron. When a charge carrier (an electron or hole) is placed into a solid, the surrounding ions can interact with it (e.g., positive ions will be slightly attracted to a negatively charged carrier). The ions can…
January 24, 2009
Via a bunch of people, but most directly Matt Ruff, the Guardian has published a list of "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read". Which has triggered the usual flurry of procrastinatory blog posts indicating which books from the science fiction and fantasy sub-list one has and hasn't read.
I have other…
January 24, 2009
Over at Neurotopia, the Evil Monkey is offering advice on how to earn extra money in graduate school:
The key to more than mere culinary survival in graduate school is to volunteer for research studies. I took part in more projects than I could count. Some don't pay squat. I once spent 2 hours a…
January 23, 2009
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Sestina: How to Build a Sestina Template in Microsoft Excel.
" Open a new Excel workbook. In cell B1, write your title. Leave row 2 blank.
In cells A3 through A8, place the letters A through F. These letters are the cues
for your repeating words (teleutons). Leave…
January 23, 2009
The last course report covered the first six classes of the relativity unit. This week, we had the final two relativity lectures, and today was the start of quantum mechanics.
Class 7: This lecture was about how you can use special relativity to show that a magnetic field in a stationary frame is…
January 23, 2009
Baby Blogging is late this week, because SteelyKid has come down with the cold virus that's going around the JCC day care center. Snotty, crying, coughing babies aren't all that photogenic. I finally got a decent picture of her emerging from her sling after a two-hour nap:
It's a little tough to…
January 23, 2009
The Physics and Astronomy colloquium this week was by Jill Linz from Skidmore, talking about a couple of physics outreach programs she's worked on. This being right up my alley, I made it a point to get in early enough to see the colloquium (I spent the morning at home with the sick SteelyKid, and…
January 22, 2009
Steven Chu Addresses the National Labs | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"The new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, addressed the national labs in an all-hands video transmission today. I was not there, but my colleague and friend Rob Roser at Fermilab was there, and sent me a very nice…
January 22, 2009
My graduate alma mater made some news this week, with a new quantum teleportation experiment in which they "teleport" the state of one ytterbium ion to another ytterbium ion about a meter away. That may not sound like much, but it's the first time anybody has done this with ions in two completely…
January 22, 2009
Here are the results of yesterday's poll, as of about 10pm Eastern. Blue bars are the fraction of respondents saying that a given behavior (wearing hats, eating in class, drinking in class, leaving class to go to the bathroom) was acceptable, red bars the fraction saying it was unacceptable:
You…
January 22, 2009
SteelyKid is now in day care five days a week. This is good for us, in that it lets Kate and I both go back to work full-time, and good for her, in that she gets to meet new people, and spend the whole day playing with interesting toys.
Of course, it has its bad sides, too. The norovirus that laid…
January 21, 2009
Legoland California's depiction of Barack Obama's inauguration | World news | guardian.co.uk
(tags: politics news silly pictures toys)
Let My Students Drink: College presidents say it's time to lower the drinking age - Reason Magazine
"Q: Why lower the drinking age?
A: Weâve had a law on the…
January 21, 2009
I went to a panel discussion yesterday about teaching issues, and was struck by both the strength and the range of opinions regarding classroom atmosphere. Some people are very laissez-faire about what students can do in class, while others have very strict codes of classroom behavior. One…
January 21, 2009
Lots of people are giving Obama props for the shout-out to atheists in his inaugural address, but I'm deeply concerned about what he said. Or, rather, what he didn't say:
We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers.
Where are the Buddhists? He left out a major…
January 21, 2009
I'm listening to "Mike and Mike" on ESPN radio, as I usually do in the morning, and they just spent the better part of five minutes talking about the point spread for the upcoming Super Bowl. The opening betting line has Pittsburgh favored by seven points, but some Las Vegas organization or another…
January 20, 2009
Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 5 (2009): Lauren E. Kost, Steven J. Pollock, and Noah D. Finkelstein - Characterizing the gender gap...
"Binned by quintiles, we observe that males and females with similar pretest scores do not have significantly different post-test scores (p>0.2) . The post-…
January 20, 2009
Joseph Lowery wins the Inauguration.
Obama's speech was no slouch, either, but anybody who gets a hundred thousand people to yell "Amen!" wins.
I'm wearing a T-shirt today that says "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist." And I can't really…
January 20, 2009
A Sample Book Proposal: Newton and the Counterfeiter | ScienceOnline09
"I donât mean to suggest that this is a generalizable model, just an example of one approach that worked in the marketplace. As noted in the Wiki page for the session â to be moderated by David Munger and myselfâbesides the…
January 20, 2009
This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it's a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics-- Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the…
January 20, 2009
SteelyKid was delivered by Caesarean section (MacDuff won't stand a chance...). They let me in to the operating room just before the moment of delivery, and I stuck around while they cleaned her up and did the early tests that they do on newborns, before they brought her over for me and Kate to see…
January 19, 2009
Back in the "Uncomfortable Questions" thread, Thony C suggested that I should do running updates on the course I'm teaching now. I meant to get to this sooner, but last weekend's bout with norovirus kind of got in the way...
I like the idea, though, so below the fold are a bunch of comments on the…
January 19, 2009
I think I missed this the first time around, but this weekend, I watched the bloggingheads conversation about quantum mechanics between Sean Carroll and David Albert. In it, David makes an extended argument against the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (starting about 40:00 into the…
January 19, 2009
Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him:
My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica's notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and…
January 18, 2009
Information Processing: The Age of Computing
"Historians of science have seen fit to ignore the history of the great discoveries in applied physics, engineering and computer science, where real scientific progress is nowadays to be found. Computer science in particular has changed and continues…
January 18, 2009
Looking for a way to kill some time on a Sunday morning? You could do worse than yesterday's bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation between Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering what to expect from the Obama administration, artifical life, the possibility…
January 18, 2009
Arts & Letters Daily has an item announcing the death of Andrew Wyeth (the link goes to the New York Times obit). This is noteworthy to me because he's one of a very few artists whose work (in poster form) has ever hung on my wall. Specifically, this painting, titled "Soaring":
I picked it up…
January 17, 2009
Explaining the curse of work - science-in-society - 14 January 2009 - New Scientist
"How many members can a committee have and still be effective? Parkinson's own guess was based on the 700-year history of England's highest council of state- in its modern incarnation, the UK cabinet. Five times…
January 17, 2009
I went to a meeting earlier this week with a bunch of other faculty members and students. Before the meeting proper got going, a few of the other faculty were discussing whether they should cancel their mid-day Tuesday classes because of the Inauguration.
This struck me as an obvious "No," but they…
